Holocaust in the Middle East
On 20 July 1942, a German warplane touched down in the Egyptian desert near El Alamein, where German and Italian forces were battling Britain’s Eighth Army. From the plane stepped Walther Rauff, a blond, blue-eyed Obersturmbannfuhrer – a lieutenant colonel in the SS, the brutal, elite corps of the Nazi Party.
At 36, Rauff was already an engineer of death. His previous assignments included the mass production of mobile gas chambers used by the SS to murder as many as half a million people in eastern Europe as part of the Final Solution, the Nazi genocide of Jews.
From the plane, Rauff went to Erwin Rommel’s battle headquarters, where he presented his orders to the field marshal’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Siegfried Westphal. As commander of a new mobile killing unit, an Einsatzkommando, Rauff was assigned to carry out “executive measures”, meaning mass murder of Jews, as soon as Rommel completed his expected conquest of Egypt. Rauff had come from Berlin, where the Nazi leadership was awash with optimism about Rommel “pressing forward through Egypt into the Near East”, as German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had just told the Japanese ambassador.
After Egypt, Rauff’s next target would be the 500,000 or more Jews of Palestine. And if, as Adolf Hitler expected, Rommel’s tanks drove forward to the oil fields of Iraq, the Jews of that country and of Syria and Lebanon would face mortal danger.
But Rommel’s chief of staff explained to Rauff that logistical problems, especially lack of fuel, were delaying the Axis forces’ advance, so the two agreed that Rauff and his team would move from Germany to Athens, Greece. From there, they
